17th Century Poetry (Metaphysical Poetry)
Background on Metaphysical poetry
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Still to Be Neat
Still to be neat, still to be dressed,
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfumed:
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.
from The Silent Woman
John Donne (1572-1631)
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly' away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no;
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity1 our love.
Moving of th' earthº brings harms and fears, an earthquake
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,2
Though greater far, is innocent.º harmless
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admitº endure
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elementedº it. composed
But we by' a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss
1
I.e., those who do not understand such love.
2
A trembling of the celestial spheres, hypothesized by Ptolemaic astronomers to account for unpredicted variations in
the paths of the heavenly bodies.
Our two souls, therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansión,
Like gold to airy thinnessº beat. that of gold leaf
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compassesº are two; compasses used in drawing circles
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquelyº run; in a circle
Thy firmness makes my circle just,º complete
And makes me and where I begun.
